Come As You Are Lyrics: Come as you are, as you were / As I want you to be / As a friend, as a friend / As a known enemy / Take your time, hurry up / The choice is yours, don't be late / Take a rest as a

as a case study. I’m doing this for a few reasons: the song has an interesting context, a lot written about it (to research), and lyrics that are kind of confusing. (Even Kurt Cobain himself said they were confusing.) The song page was also in decent shape when I found it, but it could use some tightening up, especially on the annotations of the lyrics.

OK where to start. First of all, I want to put the song into its musical context, which is the job of the SLA. For this I start with Wikipedia, but I’m not really interested in what the Wiki has to say. Wikipedia is great, but we don’t want to copy it obviously and often their treatment of music is a little lame. What I’m really interested in on a wikipedia page is the Notes at the bottom of the page. It’s the boring ass thing that you usually skip that looks like this:

This unassuming looking section is a goldmine. This is because the Wikiers did all this work for you and probably didn’t even quote these sources fully and find every bit of juice. When you’re doing research for a paper this is the equivalent of looking at the bibliography or footnotes of something on the same subject to find out how they sourced it. When I see something in the body of the text that looks interesting, I click the note and it takes me to the bottom. But sometimes the interesting is hidden in the boring. Check this out:

Okay that’s a pretty dry account of the recording session, BUT it tells me that the source has information about the making of the song. So I follow it and find the somewhat cryptic footnote that says “Berkenstadt; Cross, p. 71” This means it’s a book not an article. Bummer because who has time to go to a library right? Wrong. Very likely there will be samples of the book in Google Books and if you’re lucky they’ll have the part you are looking for. So I drop “Berkenstadt Cross Nirvana” into books. In this case we’re pretty lucky, even though the Google Books preview has only a fragment of the section on Come As You Are:

Ton of cool info about the song! I can add this kind of stuff to the SLA to give a fuller story For me the most interesting part is about Cobain not taking many solos and the producer’s comments. That’s a lil nugget of aesthetic info that’s obviously not right for an annotation on a lyric, but perfect for the SLA.

MAKING A LIL' INTERPRETATION BASED ON A FACT
That’s a piece of information that can stand on its own, or if you are feeling frisky, this where you can start to hazard interpretations about that fact based on what you already know about the band or your other research. Start to fill out the picture. Why didn’t Kurt play a lot of solos? I think I might know why! Well, I already know Kurt Cobain was heavily influenced by Punk rock, and I know the self-indulgent guitar solo is a big no-no in punk aesthetics, so I might say something like “Kurt Cobain’s immersion in punk aesthetics meant that he didn’t often do solos like this.” This is an inference that extrapolates from the fact, but I feel like it’s warranted based on what I already know about this band and their influences. It sounds like a small, modest jump, but you are already putting the song in musical historical context and interpreting the musician’s aesthetic moves, which I think is pretty cool and useful to a fan! They are getting to know the artist better and knowing where to look next for music like this. But if you don’t feel like an expert, and don’t feel comfortable making statements, then this fact is interesting enough without an interpretation, too.

NB about theory building
Now of course, it’s possible my interpretation is too hasty! There could be a source out there that has Kurt saying “I love solos, I just never felt confident enough to play them” so my whole punk-aesthetics theory would be a little more doubtful. Not totally discredited perhaps, but just more doubtful. And to be intellectually honest, I’d have to note that. If I think my interpretation is strong I’ll gladly include evidence that might seem to contradict, because I think it still will hold up. I also might want to include the “incorrect” interpretation as a possible misconception to flesh out the issue. Like “You might think Kurt was being punk by not playing solos a lot, but more likely he just didn’t feel confident.” This is all hypothetical of course, if such a source existed. But I think it probably doesn’t and my take is reasonable. I’d love to be proved “wrong” though, because it means we’re getting a fuller picture.

But most importantly perhaps this book clues me into another source. It has Kurt talking about the lyrics in something called Nevermind: It’s an interview. After a little googling I find out that’s a youtube video. I gotta go through it and get to the part where he’s talking about “Come As You Are.” What he gives is pretty laconic, but it’s a pretty good basis to start to interpret the lyrics.

“The lines in the song are really contradictory. One after another they are kind of a rebuttal to each line. It’s kind of confusing I guess. It’s just about people and what they are expected to act like.” He also says: “Just because I say ‘I’ in a song doesn’t necessarily mean it’s me.”

As a matter of principle, whenever there’s something counterintuitive or confusing in a text, that’s usually where interpretation is helpful and necessary. St Augustine said something like this for interpreting the Bible: anytime something goes against commonsense, then you should suspect that there’s a symbolic meaning. Contradiction can also clue you into the presence of irony, which in this context just basically means that someone is saying different or opposite from what they appear to be saying on the surface.

Right now the annotation says:

That seems to me a little overwrought considering what Kurt actually said. I always like being parsimonious and close to the context of the song. So think, Kurt Cobain’s oeuvre and the Grunge movement, not necessarily the entirety of civilization as the meaningful context. No need to talk about Machiavelli here, even though I love Niccolo. It seems to me that Kurt is being ironic and wants to express the contradictory directions people get from society: be yourself, don’t be yourself etc. I also know from my pre-knowledge that personal authenticity and the use of irony are big themes in Grunge. (Those claims need unpacking too obviously, but another time.) So if I rewrote it (and I will if one you doesn’t get there first), I’d try to get that through.

Now the “I don’t have a gun lyric.” Considering the fact that Kurt killed himself with a gun, you know people are gonna look for meaning in that line. It sounds like foreshadowing. Okay, but within the context of the song and what Kurt said about the “I” in the song not necessarily being him ,maybe that’s not the best interpretation. I think that’s ironic too. it sounds like the person saying “I dont have a gun” is actually a bad guy, trying to pretend like they are nonthreatening. Seems like this is still about the duplicitous people and roles. So I changed up this annotation a bit already:

It’s not perfect, but it’s closer to what I think is the right interpretation. Now that’s obviously not the end of the story. Interpretations can coexist and compete. Back on the Wiki page some dude on Allmusic has a different view: Deming reasons that the “I don’t have a gun” lyric is Cobain’s “attempt to reassure listeners that … his target is the world at large rather than the individuals in it, and that there was still room in this damaged world for everyone”. Now I happen to think he reasons wrong and that he missed the irony of the song, but it’s a reasonably respectable interpretation and probably wouldn’t hurt to include it. I just stumbled on this now so I’ll go back and add that to fill out the picture. It’s already kind of there, but it could use this guy’s quote as an authority to back it up. If you wanna be fair. I think he’s dead wrong, but again, to be intellectually honest I should give it some play. I know the fair-minded and intelligent will favor my clearly superior take, right? ;)

RECAP

Granted this is kind of an ideal case. Nirvana has a ton of shit written about them, so there’s great sources, and there’s cryptic lyrics that cry out for interpretation. The song is also a very important one and just giving the context of its release and recording is worthwhile in itself. Many songs are not gonna be as rich in sources or possible takes. But often they will have moments where you can begin to start a process like this one. Evidence helps you to make interesting interpretations that get to the heart of the artist’s idea. The collection and interpretation of evidence is an open-ended process. In theory, there’s no final answer, but there are more convincing and less convincing takes. There’s always the possibility of new theories and facts that back them up. You come to a text with a bunch of presumptions and fore-knowledge and then the course of that they get challenged and revised. That’s the quest of knowledge IMHO.

john ya good. To piggyback on that AllMusic.com shoutout—it’s a really helpful place to find writing credits for new songs, and writing credits often lead me to a sample that Wikipedia hasn’t listed yet.

I agree that a lot of precious information is left out of the Wikipedia articles as adding those footnotes is mostly what I do there. And you get to read a lot of interesting stuff while doing reasearch to add them, but it doesn’t fit the Wikipedia article so you end up leaving those clues. I’m glad someone actually reads them.

@JohnGanz Spot-on interpretation in my opinion. Have tried to convince people the gun lyric is not a foreshadowing, but yeah, why would they even listen to me? Anyway I’m curious what you think of “memoria/memory”. How does it pertain to the rest of the song?

Are there other ways you find sources than Wikipedia footnotes?

@sam_satomi Definitely the only thing allmusic is good for imo lol, and finding compilation albums.

@Dyazz Yeah I don’t really have a theory about that I just think it kind works of musically. He goes as a memory-uhhhh and then it turns into the hook. Anything else feels like forcing it.

Yes, that’s a good question. That’s my main way to source, but I just go straight to google books sometimes. Often entire issues of old magazines will be available there. I also try to find archived websites on sites like the internet archive https://archive.org/web/. For recent songs, google is king. I try to find recent interviews with the artists. If I can’t I look for older interviews that might help explain where they’re at musically now or give a hint about what they are talking about.

@Dyazz Google can be frustrating like @ewokABdevito well puts it, as it will give you the most popular and most recent results first. You can try to go around this by selecting specific periods of time. Like around album releases or tour dates. I like reading not so recent interviews when the artists/bands weren’t all that famous because local/university press sometimes asks more out-of-the-box questions. As they get covered by larger publishers, articles tend to become repetitive.

Great stuff here, @JohnGanz. Google Books is super helpful, and I also like AllMusic. The intrepid critics at the latter site have reviewed just about every album ever, and even if you don’t agree with their interpretation of a given record, you can kind of get a sense of where the artist was at that particular time in their career and what the general consensus was surrounding the release. (They don’t tend to be naysayers or boat rockers over there.)

Re: something like Cobain and the gun line, I think the key is to tread lightly and not jump to conclusions. If you’re super knowledgeable about the artist, it’s a bit more justifiable. Ideally, if you’re commenting on someone’s suicide or drug use or mental state—any of the really important stuff it would suck to be wrong about—you’re pretty familiar with their life and work. Otherwise, I’d venture to say you should leave those types of annotations to someone else. Or else hop in the forums and try to surface some knowledge from the community. Anyone have any great examples of this working?

Nice work @JohnGanz. I think the OP goes to show just how much should go into actually “getting it right”, or at least trying to. Obviously Nirvana has inspired a bit more in-depth analysis then someone like Drake, but even when deciphering things like Drake’s recent embrace of Jamaican culture I’ve used Wikipedia links to point me in the right direction.

It wasn’t a difficult tate to interpret, but finding the information was key. After searching “2 Chainz jail” and “2 Chainz Juvenile” I thought an interview might be more fruitful, so I began searching “2 Chainz teenage interview” . I nailed it with “2 Chainz childhood interview” and I found the appropriate info.

A significant amount of annotating and editing is knowing how to google. So many times I have heard lyrics and thought “damn, that’s a connection I just can’t think where it comes from. ” Using the qutoation marks in searches is the key.

This tate for example, I found the info via “Drake rapper hotel,” which brought me to the song page of a track he recorded in a hotel.

I believe in the process of placing your interpretation at the very top of the annotation, then using the rest to back yourself up.

This is fabulous @JohnGanz. I was idly wondering last week what I would like to see for future tate talks and (without being aware of what has been suggested) research was the first thing that came to mind. Some of this is stuff I’m kind of familiar with, but it was so useful to be taken step-by-step through a process for a specific song.

For Google Books, I can sometimes use it as a way of citing something and linking directly and specifically to one page of a printed book. I son’t know whether I’ve seen anybody else do this, but if you enter specific search terms within a particular book (so that only one page is returned as a result), you can use the resultant URL as a link that users can click on. In this way, they can see straight away where I’ve got the quote from—without having to write a full citation—and see for themselves what surrounds it, and perhaps discover a book that they might have interest in checking out in full. If you’re lucky (not always possible) it’s more efficient and useful than ordinary academic citations, because the reader doesn’t have to get out their chair to hunt down a book, and they don’t even have to search through Google Books to find the exact quotation.

Example: the bio I wrote for The Beatles' “From Me to You” quotes from a book, and the following highlighted text from the bio—“According to Kevin Courrier’s book”—should send you straight to pages 51 and 52, where the quotation crosses over both. I didn’t go very deep with this bio, but hopefully it’s a solid example of what I’m actually describing.

Also, there are usually several editions of the same book on Google Books—if you’re not able to preview the first one you click on, scroll down and look at the list of “Other Editions”. Under each one it says either “No Preview”, “Limited Preview”, or “Snippet View”. Limited Preview is what you want; Snippet View can sometimes work but it’s a lot trickier. (You probably already knows this but just in case … In the past I think I sometimes gave up on finding something on Google Books without checking thoroughly enough.)

I have some thoughts on using dictionaries specifically for research, but they’re probably quite small points and I’ll (try to) keep this one post to one thing. With a lot of stuff I annotate I try to get very specific about the language, so a lot of what I do isn’t necessarily about chasing down references or allusions or interviews; it can be about trying to get as full a sense I can of a specific word and trying to make suggestions about how it works. I also like to link to idiom dictionaries and discussions so users can read about them (if they ever care to), and not just rely on my own understanding of words and phrases.

Sometimes I’ve found that the economical citations in wikipedia’s notes (“Berkenstadt; Cross, p. 71”) aren’t always enough to make sure I turn up the right book. But they have reference sections too, basically a conventional bibliography, where you can get the full titles + place and date of publication, etc. That’s probably obvious, but I remember somehow missing that section when I was having trouble sourcing the book that the wiki page had actually quoted from.

I believe in the process of placing your interpretation at the very top of the annotation, then using the rest to back yourself up.

Definitely, very nicely put, I’m certain I agree with this, although I don’t necessarily know whether it’s what I tend to do in my own stuff (probably because the very word “interpretation” makes me slightly uncomfortable)

also:

A significant amount of annotating and editing is knowing how to google. […] Using the quotation marks in searches is the key.

yeppers

also Google Scholar, perhaps for older stuff or lit, although you risk turning up a lot of stuff published in academic journals (not accessible to a lot of users)—possibly interesting but possibly v. dense with limited returns for genius tates

@jayclay 100% cosign your breakdown of how to link directly to Google Books for citations. You’re definitely not alone. It’s been a saving grace for Hamilton, which at this point should have its own Google Library of all the resources we’ve linked to throughout our annotations.

Cosign @Theonlydjorkaeff, too. Knowing what to Google being a big contributor to getting good content. That, and not being afraid to try different search strings when your first try doesn’t get results! I went through this process when I updated “Careless Whisper.” I found a really great interview with George Michael on his feelings being in the closet during his Wham! days after searching like five variations on “George Michael closet secret teenager.” Also, “Careless Whisper saxophone take” finally yielded this tidbit from Wham’s sound engineer that was AWESOME because it really got into the making of that iconic sax solo.

This thread is becoming quite interesting for me on the tips about Google Books, as I don’t use it as much, because I research more about artist/bands over the last decade, who wouldn’t be on a book yet.

A significan amout of annotation and editing is knowing how to google. (…) Using the quotation marks in searches is key

I also agree with @Theonlydjorkaeff and @epaulettes For example, to support a Wikipedia statement about who did the art cover of a bands' album I crossed the bands name and the artist’s name and ended up finding interviews I had never read, for a band whose online articles I know way too well. Recententy, I read that not all the songs of a certain album had been recorded at the same studio, and when I googled the bands' name with the studio to try to check it out, I found another set of interviews I probably wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. A lot of it is about finding the right keywords to do your search with.